Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Gardiner has served as a foreign policy adviser to two US presidential campaigns. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, BBC, and Fox Business Network.

The Muslim Brotherhood gets a PR makeover from the Obama administration

Unsavoury organisations usually pay large amounts of money to glitzy PR firms to improve their public image. In the case of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood however, the Obama administration has offered its services for free. US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper gave an extraordinary testimony on Thursday before a House Intelligence Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, where he described the Islamist group as a peaceful, “largely secular” organisation that “eschewed violence.” In Clapper’s words:

"The term 'Muslim Brotherhood' … is an umbrella term for a variety of movements, in the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried Al Qaeda as a perversion of Islam… there is no overarching agenda, particularly in the pursuit of violence…"

After the remarks sparked outrage, the DNI issued a statement clarifying them, but to little avail. As former US Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton put it on Fox News, the comments were “perhaps the stupidest statement made by any administration in U.S. international history.”

Over at National Review, terrorism expert Andrew McCarthy described Clapper’s intervention as “willful stupidity”, a rather generous assessment:

This is the Muslim Brotherhood whose motto brays that the Koran is its law and jihad is its way. The MB whose Palestinian branch, the terrorist organization Hamas, was created for the specific purpose of destroying Israel — the goal its charter says is a religious obligation. It is the organization dedicated to the establishment of Islamicized societies and, ultimately, a global caliphate. It is an organization whose leadership says al-Qaeda’s emir, Osama bin Laden, is an honorable jihad warrior who was “close to Allah on high” in “resisting the occupation.” The same leader who insists that “the history of freedom is written not in ink [i.e., constitutions] but in blood [i.e., jihad].”

Who are you going to believe? DNI Clapper or the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Supreme Guide,” Muhammad Badi, who said it was his hope and plan to raise “a jihadi generation that pursues death, just as the enemies pursue life”? Kamal al-Halbavi, a senior member of the Brotherhood, was probably just kidding around when he told the BBC the other day that he hoped Egypt soon would have a government “like the Iranian government, and a good president like Mr. Ahmadinejad.” (These guys just have a wicked sense of humor.)

The Muslim Brotherhood is bad news. It is a dangerous anti-American and anti-Semitic movement with a brutal Islamist ideology and extremely close links to terrorist groups such as Hamas. Clapper’s remarks were a bizarre whitewash of the organisation, and yet another embarrassing gaffe by an Administration that increasingly specialises in them.